Clean Text, Ashworld, and other awesome apps of the week

An incredibly useful app that cleans your text of formatting issues is just one of our picks for this week’s “Awesome Apps of the Week” roundup.

In addition, we’ve got a brilliant music making app, an app for editing your 360 camera videos, and a superb post-apocalyptic survival adventure game. In the same week that Apple highlighted its top apps of 2017, these are our choices for the greatest apps of the past seven days. Check them out below.

Clean Text

Clean Text is one of those tools you don’t realize you need until you find out that it exists. It’s essentially an app which promises to, well, clean up your text based on any one of a number of irritating small formatting issues. That could mean turning text with fragments of HTML code back into regular text, removing double spaces, taking out hyperlinks, changing curved quotation marks to straight ones, or any of dozens of other issues.

You can check out the actual list on the Clean Text web page, or watch the video above for a few more examples. Definitely a weapon to have in your writing arsenal.

Launchpad

Novation’s brilliant Launchpad music making app for iOS got a big update this week — getting an all new interface, and the ability to unlock all of its features for the bargain price of $15.

Launchpad is similar to GarageBand’s Live Loops section, meaning that you use tappable buttons for triggering different loops. These are neatly grouped, so that each column has single instrument types, while rows are arranged according to sounds that work well with one another. (You can add in your own custom loops as well.)

There are also other effects you can manipulate, such as turning the bass down and then up again, adding glitch-like “stopper” effects, delays, stutters, filters, and way more. The app itself is free to download, although an in-app purchase will give you all of the aforementioned add-ons.

VeeR Editor

VeeR Editor is super simple, incredibly powerful.Photo: VeeR

Shooting 360-degree content is easier and more affordable than ever, but to edit it you typically need specialist software only available on Mac or PC. VeeR Editor lets you do more with your 360-degree photos and videos using just your iPhone or iPad — ranging from multi-clip editing to adding special effects, and splicing in hundreds of tracks of royalty free music.

Videos shot on the Samsung Gear 360, Insta360 One, Ricoh Theta S, Mi Sphere Camera, and other popular 360-degree cameras can all be loaded into VeeR Editor. 2K editing is available on iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus, while 1080p is supported on other models.

Ashworld

It’s the holiday season, and that can only mean one thing: you want to play an open-world survival adventure game set several hundred years in the future in a post-acocalyptic world in the wake of nuclear armageddon.

Falling into the same broad category as one of my favorite iOS games of the year, Death Road to Canada, Ashworld combines retro pixel art with a sprawling open world game that changes every time you play.

It’s a tough game that does a great job of combining missions with resource management to fully capture the post-apocalyptic Mad Max feeling. Ideally, you’ll play it on iPad, where the extra screen size and speakers makes the most of the experience. Relaxing? No. Great fun? Hell yes!